CoL49 group reading ch6 part 1 (5) Scurvhamites

[Michael Bailey]

Nice breakdown of the Scurvhamites

Bortz really explains things well - he’s not for sure the Vatican
“Courier’s Tragedy” was a Scurvhamite project, but he makes a good case -
or, rather, he states the reason his colleague D’Amico (Italian for
“friend”) sees the Scurvhamites’ hand in it.

If it is, that’s an interesting example of a religious system judging an
artistic work by their own inflexible terms of good and evil, mistaking the
map for the territory (it’s only a play; all the actors - even in roles
where they “died” - when it’s over get up and go about their business) and
overemphasizing the evil so as to “damn it eternally.”

The Scurvhamites’ dwindling-to-extinction was due to each individual’s
inability to cling to the concept of salvation in which they’d placed their
hopes:

“…those few saved Scurvhamites found themselves looking out into the gaudy
clockwork of the doomed with a certain sick and fascinated horror, and this
was to prove fatal. One by one the glamorous prospect of annihilation
coaxed them over, until there was no one left in the sect, not even Robert
Scurvham, who, like a ship’s master, had been last to go.”

That’s another instance of Goedel’s Theorem, isn’t it: a philosophical
system failing under stress? Also Original Sin, “you’ll be fine, just don’t
do thus-and-such”

It bears some resemblance to aspects of some of the less reasonable
interpretations of Protestantism as well.

Specifically, on the pornographic “Courier’s Tragedy” project, they
themselves exaggerated things they abhorred in the name of abolishing them.

Which is ironic, since holding up great evil for people to deplore
presumably would have also been Wharfinger’s intention in writing the
damned thing!